A Reassessment of the Genomic Ancestry of the World's Largest Captive Baboon Colony

The Southwest National Primate Research Center of San Antonio, Texas, hosts one of the largest captive colonies of baboons used for biomedical research. Pedigreed animals can be traced back to the second part of the last century from individuals of two Papio species: P. anubis and P. cynocephalus. We leveraged recently published genomic data from more than 800 baboons to investigate the ancestry profile of the colony members. By combining phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear genomic ancestry estimations, we confirmed P. anubis and P. cynocephalus as the main sources of the colony genetic variation. Previously unreported contributions from additional Papio species were also detected in almost 5% of the colony samples, of which P. hamadryas was the most notable, while others occurred sporadically across the data set. This extensive ancestry characterisation will be of help in biomedical investigations making use of baboons from the Southwest National Primate Research Center.